Improving Marketing ROI – 3 Top Tips

An online marketing strategy should never stop evolving and improving if it is to remain cost effective and successful. To get you started, here are 3 tips for you to consider when looking to improve your online marketing activity.

Tip 1: forecast alternative solutions
You may have a decent marketing strategy at the moment but if you don’t at least consider alternative strategies, you may be missing a good little trick to further improving your online campaign. Forecasting alternative solutions will help guide you when making crucial marketing related decisions and may help increase leads and profits!

For example, you could say we are currently spending 50% of our budget on PPC and 25% of our budget on SEO but if we were to reduce our PPC budget to 30% and increase our SEO budget to 45% could we expect more, or less returns? Would increasing our PPC budget by 10% give much larger returns or would it just give a minor, incremental increase?

This is useful but to significantly improve ROI you would need to create a set of requirements to measure and analyse your results with by making use of advanced call tracking software as well as other detailed analytics software. You also need to ask yourself which portals are converting and where are they coming from? Are they prompting telephone calls or online enquiries? Are these leads resulting in conversions or are they just enquiries? Once you have this information you can begin to improve the areas of your site that don’t seem to be converting very well by learning from the parts that are converting well.

Tip 2: Analyse all portals within the conversion funnel
It is unlikely that any one portal is going to be the direct result of a conversion. It is more likely that your customer was influenced by some of your other marketing strategies before they eventually decided to make a purchase. For instance, it is quite common for customers to carry out their research on their phone but they tend to hold back their purchase until they have access to a computer.

Looking at the types of webpages your customers visit before they make a purchase is important since your customer is likely to carry out research numerous times by reading informative pages on your website before they decide to go to the page where they can make a purchase. All these pages are part of the conversion funnel – it is important not to neglect any marketing portal when analysing their overall effectiveness to your marketing strategy. In 2012, 50% of all Internet connections were made from mobile devices and an incredible 61% of these mobile searches resulted in a phone call! This clearly shows how important it is to factor in your mobile strategy when optimising your conversion funnel.

In addition to this, looking at repeat purchases and customer loyalty cannot be neglected and you would need to determine why the customer has chosen to purchase another product from you. Of course, obtaining this information is not as simple and straight forward as looking at the initial conversion but using conversion attribution reports (found in good call tracking software) can help.

Tip 3: Learn from your mistakes
Improving ROI is a linear process and cannot be achieved overnight. The best way to do this is to know that although your initial strategy may seem brilliant to start with, it may not be as good as you think and you should always be on the lookout for a more effective solution. Analyse your past performance to determine what is working well and what could be improved. You may choose to look at variations within the marketing mix, analysing the performance of your various target segments as well as testing new offers.

Completely changing a marketing strategy can sometimes be harmful – a more sensible solution would be to allocate a pre-agreed portion of your budget on trying new strategies on small scale. Any strategy found that seems to be performing better than the existing strategy can then be rolled out on a much bigger scale.